


Classic Stuff

by spaciireth



Category: Castle, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 09:35:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaciireth/pseuds/spaciireth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of strange murders have been occurring, and apparently aliens are to blame.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Classic Stuff

**Author's Note:**

> This was written, and therefore subsequently set around Season 3 of Castle, I think. And Who-wise, somewhere around Series 2, since Rose is there.

“Detective Beckett? There's been a third body found.”  
  
This and an address was all the information Detective Kate Beckett needed before she was grabbing her coat and heading out the door of her apartment. This case had only been open three days and a new body had turned up each evening. One had been found under a tree in Central Park, another slumped over the steering wheel of a car. The third one, Beckett discovered upon arrival, was slumped against the outside wall of a downtown nightclub.   
  
What was odd about all three cases was that the bodies showed very little sign of... well, a murder. There had been no struggle, and according to witnesses, the victims had all been in perfect health only an hour or so before they were found. The only thing suspicious about any of the deaths was the unidentifiable substance Lanie had discovered during autopsies. She'd sent samples to forensics for further examination but so far there had been no word.   
  
The only lead they had at the moment was that a man with shaggy hair and wearing a pinstripe suit had been seen at the two initial scenes, but so far tracking him down was proving difficult. According to witnesses he always seemed to turn up, very quickly examine the bodies and then run off again. A witness at the first site had mentioned some kind of torch that he waved about a bit. The second time, he was supposedly accompanied by a blonde woman. Kate had seen some strange cases during her time at the 12th, but this was ranking amongst the strangest.   
  
“Hey, Beckett!” Kate turned at the sound of Detective Esposito's voice. “Look who we found.”   
  
Ryan and Esposito each held one of the arms of the man in the pinstripes, who was struggling somewhat lamely in their grip and babbling on in a British accent about – Kate struggled to keep her eyebrows from raising – aliens?  
  
“No, you don't understand,” he was saying, “you _can't_ move this body. An alien somewhere is feeding off this man's brain waves, the second you move him out of its range, he'll die and the alien will move onto someone else! You've got to let me find an antidote for the venom before he dies like the first two!”   
  
“Uh-huh,” Kate responded as she walked up to meet him. “Sir, witnesses have placed you at two crime scenes exactly like this one in the past two nights, and now you've turned up here. Would you care to explain to me exactly what's going on?”  
  
“Are you in charge here?” When Kate nodded, the British man continued, “I must ask you not to move this body. If you do, that man will die!”   
  
“Hate to break it to you, but he's already dead.”   
  
“No, no, _no,_ he's not, he's _dreaming,_ and the brainwaves that his dreams are creating are feeding an alien that's lurking around here somewhere. I've got to find an antidote to its poison and get it on home or more people are going to die!”  
  
Kate closed her eyes for a second, trying to make the slightest sense of what the man was saying. When that failed, she opened them again and looked at Ryan and Esposito, and said,   
“Bring him down to the station.”   
  
~*~   
  
Kate stayed around to examine the scene a little longer and see if there was anything she'd missed, but when she arrived back at the station, the British man was still going on about aliens. Esposito met her outside the interrogation room and informed her that all they'd been able to get out of him so far was that he called himself the Doctor, and that he supposedly travelled through time and space in a blue box with a friend named Rose, who he had left in Macy's while he investigated. She was supposed to have met back up with him by now, and he was a little worried she'd got lost.   
  
Kate was relieved when her phone rang; it was Lanie, telling her the results had come back from the lab. She decided she would leave Ryan and Esposito to see what else they could get out of the “Doctor”, while she’d go down to the lab to see her friend. Hopefully the trip would lead to something helpful.  
  
~*~  
  
“Aliens? Awesome! I can’t believe you didn’t call me!” Beckett rolled her eyes, completely unsurprised by Richard Castle’s boyish enthusiasm.   
  
“Castle? There are _no_ aliens, okay?”  
  
“Oh, come on, Beckett! Alien being feeding off human brains? That’s classic stuff!”   
  
Kate just rolled her eyes again, and sat down at her to desk to try to sort out the afternoon’s events. The Doctor hadn’t been the least bit helpful, just continued to go on about venoms and antidotes. They’d eventually had to let him go. On top of all that, forensics hadn’t been able to identify the substance Lanie had found, leaving them with absolutely no leads and nowhere to go.   
  
She’d been staring at their case board for about an hour, trying to figure out some kind of connection between their three victims, when she was interrupted by the Doctor’s voice, which was raised, and calling for her. Confused, she stood up and walked towards the commotion, Castle, Ryan and Esposito following behind her.   
  
“Ah, Detective Beckett!” the Doctor exclaimed at the sight of her. “Now you’ll have to believe me.”   
  
“Oh, yeah?” Kate challenged, “Have you got an alien for me?”  
  
“No,” the Doctor replied, pulling out a strange looking contraption and hitting a switch on it. A blue light lit up on the top. “Sonic screwdriver,” he said, by way of explanation. He began to slowly turn around, as though using it as some sort of sensor, and continued his original sentence. “But the alien is inside this building.”   
  
“I’m sorry?” Kate responded, determinedly ignoring the gleeful looks that Ryan, Castle and Esposito shared with one another.   
  
“Oh, yes, I traced it here, definitely this building.” The Doctor held up a vial he had in his other hand. “Sooner or later, someone in this building is going to collapse, the same way your other three victims did. They will be showing no vital signs, as far as anyone can tell, they will be dead. Administer this antidote to them, and you will find that this is not the case at all.”   
  
The Doctor’s speech was interrupted by a chair crashing over, and everyone turned to see Castle leaning on a nearby desk, suddenly looking like death itself.   
  
“Castle?” Beckett exclaimed, her voice tinged with worry.   
  
“I’m fine,” he winced, but in the next moment he’d slid down the desk to the floor, eyes closed.   
  
“Just like that,” commented the Doctor casually. Beckett shot him a glare before racing to Castle’s side. She jumped into action, immediately beginning mouth-to-mouth.   
  
She was barely aware that she was whispering to Castle to please be okay, that he couldn’t just _die_ on her like this, nor did she notice when the Doctor knelt down next to her at his side. He gently placed a hand on her arm and offered the vial of antidote.   
  
Kate looked at it warily. “How do I know what’s in it? You could be the one trying to kill him.”   
  
“Please, trust me.”  
  
”Beckett, he hasn’t got a pulse.” Ryan was kneeling on Castle’s other side, the writer’s wrist in his hand.   
  
Her face taking on a look of resolve, Kate snatched the small bottle from the Doctor’s hand and began removing the lid. She motioned to Ryan to prop up Castle’s seemingly lifeless body, and poured some of the liquid into his mouth. Ryan laid him down again, and everyone in the room waited with baited breath.  
  
It took a little while, but the colour started reappearing in Castle’s cheeks and soon enough he was breathing again. Kate tried to keep her sigh of relief as subtle as possible, but considering her colleagues were all breathing similar ones, hers probably wouldn’t have been noticed anyway.  
  
Castle grinned at the concerned faces staring down at him when he opened his eyes. “Did the alien get me?” he asked.   
  
“It did,” the Doctor confirmed, “but you’re back with us now.”   
  
“So... did we catch it?”   
  
The Doctor’s expression became grim. “Not yet.” He pulled out the screwdriver with the blue light again. “It’s close, though.”   
  
He stood up, and by this stage had every person in the immediate vicinity hanging on his every word. Kate was the only one who didn’t actually follow him for a few steps as he followed the signal on his screwdriver.   
  
“Come on, I know you’re around here, somewhere.” Kate wondered if the Doctor’s mutterings would actually help. She raised her eyebrows again got down on his knees at the edge of her desk and started poking around underneath it.   
  
“Aha! Your shield doesn’t work on me, my friend!”  
  
The screwdriver began emitting a series of louder noises than those it had made previously, and the Doctor seemed to be getting somewhat violent with it. A moment later, nearly everyone either gasped or shrieked as a small, dark figure appeared under the desk where nothing had been a moment ago. One final zap and the figure collapsed on the floor, not moving.   
  
The Doctor picked it up and carried it back to where everyone was waiting. Castle’s eyes were huge with excitement, and he crossed to the Doctor to better examine the creature. Its skin was a dark blue colour, and scaly to the touch. Apart from that, it reminded Castle of a small chimp.   
  
“Is it dead?” he asked, and the Doctor shook his head.   
  
“No need for that. Just asleep. He’s a long way from home, but I’ll be able drop him off.”   
  
“You mean, you have a ship around here, too?!”   
  
The Doctor shrugged casually. “’Course.”   
  
“Wow.” Castle’s eyes filled with awe as he allowed the Doctor to walk past him.   
  
“Is your, uh, ship far?” Kate asked.   
  
“No, not really, just around the corner, actually.”   
  
“Awesome! Can we see it?” That was Castle again, of course. This time, Kate couldn’t help but smile. And so it was that, in spite of herself, Kate found herself accompanying Castle and the Doctor out of the precinct to go and see a spaceship.   
  
~*~  
  
Half-an-hour later, not quite believing what she had just seen to be actually possible, Kate stepped back out onto familiar New York streets.   
  
Tempting as it had been to just say yes, Kate had politely declined the Doctor’s offer of interstellar travel. She also reminded Castle that he had a mother and daughter who relied on him, so he couldn’t just go gallivanting off to different planets just because he wanted to. Castle had proceeded to manage to look far more crestfallen than was strictly necessary.   
The Doctor and Rose, who had by then reappeared, joined them on the sidewalk to them farewell. Leaving Castle to chat with Rose, Kate took the Doctor aside to talk to him in private.   
  
“I wanted to say thank you,” she said, “for saving Castle’s life. He’s... he’s a great friend, I’d hate to have lost him.”   
  
The Doctor’s eyebrows rose. “Friend? You two aren’t...?” He allowed the question to linger.   
  
“No,” Kate replied firmly, ‘no, just friends.” She nodded for emphasis.   
  
“You seemed very close, that’s all.”   
  
“We’ve worked a lot of cases together.”   
  
The Doctor gave her a knowing smile. Kate wished people would stop giving her looks like that when it came to the writer. She decided it was best to ignore it and instead turned, motioning to the Doctor that they should rejoin their friends.   
  
“Well, we’d best be off, I promised Rose I’d take her to the best ice-cream parlour this side of the Milky Way.”   
  
Rose grinned. “Yeah, if we get there,” she teased, before turning to Kate and Castle and explaining, “this’ll be his third attempt arriving in the right spot.”   
  
The Doctor pretended to look wounded. “Well, third time’s the charm, right? Come on.”   
  
With quick hugs of farewell for Castle and Kate, the Doctor and his companion disappeared back inside the TARDIS. The detective and writer watched from the sidewalk as the ship began to emit a strange kind of wheezing sound before fading out of sight completely. Once there was nothing more to see, they turned in the direction of the police station.   
  
“So, what did you do when you thought I was dead?” Castle asked, keen to hear Beckett’s answer.   
She was ready for such questions, though, and quipped, “Oh, I thought I might finally get a bit of peace and quiet.” It was Castle’s turn to pretend to look hurt this time and Kate grinned at him, before relenting. “I’m glad you’re okay, Castle.” They shared a smile, before something else occurred to Castle.   
  
“So... what are you going to write on the report for this one?”  
  
“I have _no_ idea.”


End file.
